I have an application that applies XSL Stylesheets to XML data to produce HTML. The stylesheets are external files that exist in a directory and are read in by the application. Each stylesheet is applied to the same XML, they just provide different "views" of the same data (i.e., Summary info, detail info, specific info, etc.). Since the files are stored externally the idea is that they don't have any correlating information in the database, but there is the desire to have certain metadata information for each stylesheet, such as author, name, description, etc.
The idea was to add a new namespace to the xslt document and use it to store the metadata. This could then be read as the stylesheets were read by the application. Example: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"; xmlns:cdx="http://mycompany/stylesheets";> <xsl:output method="html"></xsl:output> <cdx:sheet name="Summary Info" description="Summary Info of order." systemid="14653A6E-0A63-46D5-B2FE-EDD0BAE22A0C" author="M. Wood"></cdx:sheet> <xsl:template match="/"> <HTML> ...rest of stylesheet template.... </HTML> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> Now, the plan was on application startup to look in this directory and iterate the stylesheet files. Open each one and read them into a hashtable. The meta data would be loaded as well and used to provide a dropdown later in the application for a list of possible stylesheets to apply to the data. We wanted to be able to validate the stylesheets to ensure they had the cdx namespace and that it fit a schema (to ensure all the required fields were filled out for the metadata; see scheme at end of email). Here is where I ran into my issue. I can't seem to find a way to validate this stylesheet. My approaches so far: 1) Use an XMLValidatingReader object to load in the stylesheet. As far as I knew this was the only .Net object used to validate XML against a schema. So, I attempted this. I added the schema file to the schema collection, but on the Read method it died since the xsl (http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform) namespace did not validate. I thought, okay, all I need to do is add this schema to the collection, but wait....that would require a physical schema file for XSL. Hmmm....doesn't sound like a good thing to me. But, wait, VS.Net ships with one of these! So, pop the xslt.xsd file into the schema collection and then it doesn't like the embedded HTML in the templates. *Sigh* 2) Before I was working on the validation of the stylesheets I was already applying the stylesheets in a reference model by loading it up in the XSLTransform object. This appeared to be validating the stylesheet against the XSLT schema, but pretty much ignored the other namespace completely. I could not find a way to get it to check the other namespace via it's schema. The help specifically states, "if you have entities in your xsl that you need to validate, use the XMLValidatingReader class". Hmmm, see above frustration. I'm using the 1.1 Framework where over half of the Load methods in the XSLTRansform object have been obsolete. So, what I really need to be able to validate the cdx namespace only in the document and pretty much ignore the xsl namespace or the HTML in the templates. Schema for the cdx namespace: ______________________________________ <?xml version="1.0" ?> <xs:schema id="CdxStylesheet" targetNamespace="http://mycompany/stylesheets"; xmlns:mstns="http://mycompany/stylesheets"; xmlns="http://mycompany/stylesheets"; xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"; xmlns:msdata="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xml-msdata" attributeFormDefault="qualified" elementFormDefault="qualified"> <xs:element name="sheet"> <xs:complexType> <xs:attribute name="name" form="unqualified" type="xs:string" /> <xs:attribute name="description" form="unqualified" type="xs:string" /> <xs:attribute name="systemid" form="unqualified" type="xs:string" /> <xs:attribute name="author" form="unqualified" type="xs:string" /> </xs:complexType> </xs:element> </xs:schema> =================================== This list is hosted by DevelopMentorŪ http://www.develop.com Some .NET courses you may be interested in: NEW! Guerrilla ASP.NET, 17 May 2004, in Los Angeles http://www.develop.com/courses/gaspdotnetls View archives and manage your subscription(s) at http://discuss.develop.com
